N.French, University of Birmingham
09/2016
Gazing at Pripyat from East and West: a ruin of contemplation
I travelled to Chernobyl on two separate occasions in February 2013 (1 day with tour2kiev.com)
and in June 2016 (2 days with Lupine Travel), in the first instance I was invited to join a group of
friends by my co-worker in Moscow; the second time the trip was organised by the Ecological
History Network and involved students and academics from British, American and Ukrainian
universities. While access to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is strictly regulated, its borders have
been illegally penetrated almost
throughout its existence (Kots and
Steshin, 2006). Legally it ‘opened up’
for tourism in late 2000s - early
2010s. Currently, Chernobyl is visited
by around 10 thousand tourists a year
(Dyatlikovich et al., 2015), who
presumably together with illegal
adventure-seekers, hunter-gatherers
and looters, little by little have reshaped the contemporary urban ruins
of Pripyat, satellite town of the
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station.
While Pripyat officially remains
unmanaged and it is illegal to take
anything out of the Zone and tour
operators instruct against any
vandalism, I could myself observe
that compared to 2013 some things
were moved, new graffiti appeared on walls, trees were removed, etc., not to mention artificial
post-apocalyptic setups of dolls in gas masks that by no means could be attributed to the
evacuated citizens of this town. Pripyat in short is not an abandoned ruin, it seems to have a life of
its own. Yet, during my first visit, then covered in snow, the town seemed lonesome enveloped in
natural decay and ruination except…
The local dog greets
foreign tourists in
Pripyat.
2013.
When I came to Pripyat for the first time in February 2013, the journey to Pripyat was solemn and
contemplative within our group and empty with only one ghostly blue bus encounter along the way.
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N.French, University of Birmingham
09/2016
I did not expect to see two other vans parked in the town’s main square spurting foreign tourists
colourfully dressed in expedition gear (unlike us, a group of Russians, dressed in our everyday
winter attire) with cameras heavily hanging off their necks and tripods in their hands. There was a
world of difference between us, it seemed - a group of young professionals in their late 20s working
mainly in energy
generation (with one
Our group in
person working for
2013 (minus the
Rosatom) and the thrillphotographer),
seekers from distant
by the end of
places. Why were they
the tour all were
there? I felt uneasy at their
soaked and
presence, I felt as I were
freezing.
myself part of exhibit they
came to gape at. Visitation
of places connected with
death, disaster or suffering
coined ‘dark tourism’ is often compared to
some form of voyeurism, a type of morbid
curiosity or schadenfreude (Seaton and
Lennon, 2004), whose ethicacy is
questionable at best. Similarly, it was found
in Yankovska and Hannam study (2014) that
“tourists from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus
who are directly or indirectly related to
Chernobyl have a more emotional
experience due to their personal connections
with the place” (p. 934). Some explain the
differences in perspective by the so called
‘length of immersion’(Kim and Butler, 2014)
in a certain area or the likeliness to dis/
approve tourism development depending on
the place attachment. Dual nature of
Chernobyl as “a symbolic void for incommensurable loss” (Dobraszczyk, 2010) and as a morbid
attraction for urban tourists and photographers searching for photogenic representations of the
‘suffering’ frozen in time attracts both kind of spectators. And which one am I?
Every time I told a Russian person (especially of the older generation) of my intent to go to the
Chernobyl Zone, they responded with discontent partly because of the perceived inherent risks of
the exposure (a young woman who is yet to bear children) but partly, I presume, also because of
the imminent disrespect to those who suffered and died there (like going to the cemetery, they
said).
For many Chernobyl Exclusion Zone remains a place of tragedy, a ‘cemetery’ (also see Alexievich,
19991 ). So you are faced with a moral challenge even before you made a decision to go to
Chernobyl. It is interesting that same attitudes have been echoed in the aftermath of 9/11 where
the opening of the viewing platform to tourists met with the opposition from New York residents and
relatives of the victims who saw it as a form of ‘ghoulish tourism’ (Lisle, 2004).
It is clear that whatever the reasons people find for themselves to go to Chernobyl, there is a wall
of perceptional difference between those who are historically and emotionally connected to the
place and those who come to places of disaster such as Chernobyl to immerse in the ‘reality’ of
what had happened, be they foreigners or a young generation of gamers (i.e. video game
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. based in Pripyat). The place itself attracts visitors actively pursuing their goal
whatever they might be looking for in Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and whether or not they find it.
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Irina Kiseleva: “People come to the zone as they do to a cemetery. It’s not just their house that
is buried there, but an entire era. An era of faith. Of science. In a just social ideal.”(Alexievich,
1999, p. 174).
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N.French, University of Birmingham
09/2016
During my second trip, I found the Zone much busier
with construction work and busy traffic within the 30km
area. This time I joined the ‘foreign’ van and tried to
understand in our informal conversations as we
walked through Pripyat what my fellow-visitors made
of it, did they see what I saw?. We spoke of the
concept and the values behind the town and the
tragedy of its sudden abandonment and ruination Pripyat had everything, schools, cinemas, swimming
pools, furthermore it still does - the buildings are still
there standing, even after 30 years of neglect. The
further we went, the more the town seemed like a
continuing and shared history and less like a point
contained in time. We talked about socialism, the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the conflict between
Ukraine and Russia and how all of what we saw could
have been different if not for the skull of the block four
looming in the distance. Yet, a teddy bear in a gas
mask or neatly arranged cots in the maternity ward
would still inexplicably create queues of
This birch was no longer there in 2016.
‘photographers’. Everything was captured on camera bottles of dusty medicine, books, Soviet slogans,
everything - things that had meaning and those that just looked odd, emblematic, poignant or
somber.
It was curious to know how mine and my fellow-foreigners’ experience would compare - were we
seeing the same Pripyat? It was refreshing to see that their initial alertness change and somewhat
level at mindful and curious contemplation of an impressive urban space and reflection of the ideas
behind it (the Soviet dream city). And standing at the top of the high-riser and observing the 360
degrees of forest scenery, some of us expressed that it would not have been such a bad place to
live. Yet, it was not a place anyone wanted to stay.
From apprehensive voyeurism to empathetic contemplation, we saw not only a place of the worst
nuclear disaster but a place before it, too. From the worst technological disaster and the extent of
human footprint on the Earth to nature resilience to advances in containment technology to a
contemporary political situation in Ukraine to the Soviet urban planning to the collapse of the Soviet
Union - Chernobyl is a place of multiple topology and everyone experienced it differently. To quote
Davies, “the Chernobyl landscape is a place infused with contested meanings: for some, a rural
idyll tarnished by the invisible specter of radiation; and for others, simply “a place called home””.
The sources of this ‘retrospective utopia’ are plenty and vary from personal - nostalgia, mourning,
place loyalty, to superimposed - anti-nuclear attitude, pro-nuclear attitude, humanity hubris, nature
resilience, fall of the communist empire, long-lasting human footprint, deindustrialisation, etc. In
some way, Chernobyl is all of these joint together and fixed in space and time and the gaze of a
viewer. As for us, some of us came to see radiation, some - nature, some - urban ruins. But the
tragedy is never too far from representations and depictions of Chernobyl - it is a difficult subject to
engage with.
Chernobyl is believed to be more than a technological accident, and it arguably is the contributing
factor to the collapse of the Soviet socialist empire that shortly followed. The time before the
calamitous 1990s is the point of bifurcation where the present as we know it is still an impossible
scenario.
Pripyat brought up memories of my childhood of the late 1980s-1990s in the country that I was
born in and that disappeared off the maps in 1991 before I even got to know it. What followed
disconnected the perestroika generation from their history, their parents, their grandparents, and
their neighbours; the Soviet republics were set in motion, industries collapsed, families were
broken. Pripyat all of a sudden appeared to me as a place, probably the only one I have ever been
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N.French, University of Birmingham
09/2016
to since I left my hometown in 1998, that never saw and
was spared from that catastrophe by the unfortunate
events of 1986 - it was a place frozen in time before the
storm. It appeared transcendentally home-like as, for
some passing by a school, a kindergarten or a park
they used to go to as children. The toys we saw in the
kindergarten were the toys we played with, the cots and
the pots, the slogans and pictures… things that drift in
and out of your memory as you are growing up. The
hospital and the flats, the school with the textbooks
scattered on the floor the same as we carried in our
backpacks to our school, even the gas masks which
we, too, had to put on during the safety drills and that
are ‘artistically’ piled up in one of the schools of Pripyat
for all to ‘wow’ and take pictures. Not only the
appearance of places invoked fuzzy memories of home,
it was the meaning, the authenticity of their designation,
that validated them as true despite the often staged and
artificial display. Davies wrote that the detritus of late
2016.
Soviet everyday life photographed by visitors in Pripyat
“not only represent(s) the failure of an industry, but also
the collapse of an entire political
system” (2013, p. 122). These objects
in fact were soon out of production or
replaced by ‘made in China’
expendables. The material world of the
1990s post-Soviet space did change,
but Davies’ simplistic symbolism is
symptomatic of the ‘ruin porn’ he is so
eager to expose: “"ruin porn” - a guilty
visual process that celebrates urban
decay while ignoring the tragedy that it
represents” (Davies, 2013, p.
122). These objects represents fluidity
and malleability of life, sometimes
abrupt but always imminent. To assign
them with a status of a symbol of the
2013.
collapse we need to assume they were
at some point the symbol of its
existence. Although I had a mere glimpse into the Soviet everyday life, it seemed the Soviet culture
was largely intangible - people simply had very little. Like in so many written works about
Chernobyl we encounter the ‘constructed’ narratives about Chernobyl (from Christa Wolf’s
Accident: A Day’s News, to Frederik Pohl’s Chernobyl; A Novel, to the myths of mutants, to
S.T.A.L.K.E.R, to Darragh Mckean’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, to Prokhanov’s 600 Years From
The Battle, to articles in Nature, etc.) that reflect a changing context or a relation of the author to
the context of the accident (be it the Soviet Union, the peaceful atom, Ukraine/Belarus/Russia,
growing environmentalism or radiation itself). The symbols of the Soviet Union that ceased to exist
and the symbols of the collapse of the Soviet Union are hardly the same thing.
Yet, as NYC’s Ground Zero is there to remind of the radically new state of the world, Pripyat ruins
ground us in the ‘reality’ of what has rather than what could have been. It filled me not with
nostalgia, but lament for the suffering inflicted onto the people whose world, values, believes and
investments devalued in a bat of an eye. I feel empathy rather than longing for the time before
history changed its course. Yet, during my second visit, I found it more difficult to separate between
what moved me and what I found myself detached from; the hiatus between the time of the Soviet
Union and after resonates in us, the Russians (Ukrainians, Belarussians, etc.), as a cultural barrier
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N.French, University of Birmingham
09/2016
to emotional connectivity, as the historical no-go area. And I found that certain symbols of Pripyat
and nearby areas were as distant from the today me as they probably were from my foreign
colleagues some of whom knew more about the Soviet/
Russian/Ukrainian history of that time than I did. The
continuous signs of people’s presence (construction
noises, workers walking, cleaners, cooks, etc.) and signs
of change seen in my second visit synchronised the area
with the current political and historical situation and
compelled me to look through a different prism, that of me
as a foreigner to this time and to this place.
Prokhanov incepted a book about the Soviet Union
represented through its most avant-garde sociotechnical
symbiosis, a nuclear power station, and who was in search
of a dramatic element to his storyline when the accident in
Chernobyl happened. In his book, 600 years from the
battle (1988) the nuclear station is seen as a microcosm of
the whole state and society and the accident is compared
to the inner struggles, the perestroika, the nation had to
overcome. It was common to compare Chernobyl with
Apocalypses, Star of Wormwood, since it is in the station’s
The Port of Pripyat. 2016.
name (Chernobyl means wormwood in Ukrainian). The
second trip, especially visiting the Museum of Chernobyl,
opened my eyes onto the role Chernobyl played in the
collapse of the Soviet Union. After many journal articles, I stumbled upon Alexievich’s Second
Hand Time (2015) that deals with memories of the collapse and narratives of the lost, second-hand
time, hearts that broke (some literally) in the aftermath of the 1991 and 1993. The voices collected
by the writer speak of loss of international ‘friendship’, the loss of skills and values, the feeling of
being tricked and robbed by Gorbachev, Eltsin, Gaidar and the new ‘businessmen’ but also those
of solitude of money, displacement and violence. In this light Chernobyl was as much a place of
Pre-Apocalypses as of Post- - the nature thrived in 2013 and 2016 as it probably did before the
accident, the city stood as it would have and Pripyat stood abandoned by people as it probably
would have been anyway as a result of perestroika-induced out-migration and population decline.
In this context, Chernobyl is probably a less scarier place than the 1990s that displaced more
people than the radiation and saw the most dramatic demographic shock in Russia’s and Ukraine’s
modern history (Eberstadt, 2010).
The view from a high riser in Pripyat.
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Some scholars argue that visiting
the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is
akin to dark tourism (e.g. Stone,
2013; Yankovska and Hannam,
2014 5) or worse, Jean
Baudrillard’s catastrophe
cannibalism. And that visiting
such places is at best morally
questionable. I would like to
stress that the ‘darkness’ of the
input does not often match with
the that of the output of such a
journey. The personal first-hand
experience of Pripyat, of how it
lived and functioned, of who lived
and worked there, through
artefacts and discussions, could
be more than simply educational
schadenfreude. Similarly to
N.French, University of Birmingham
09/2016
Ground Zero tourism, Chernobyl visitors are active in their desire to see and ‘touch’ the reality of
the Chernobyl disaster. While the ‘real’, its scale, scope and implications, escapes single
interpretation and depends on the baggage with which the viewer came to the Zone. Tim Cole
wrote that “(i)n visiting the sites of death we are afforded a degree of titillation, albeit titillation
camouflaged by more “worthy” reasons for coming.” (2000, p. 114), but the reasons for going
somewhere rarely reflect the fullness of the experience - the place can transform visitors by
affecting them in complex ways and the ‘reality’ which they have found transcends beyond a
‘constructed’ place they thought they would see.
If Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station can be seen as wormwood star, a uranium meteorite, a straw
that broke the Soviet Union, the town of Pripyat shows the human dimension of the catastrophe,
whether interpreted literally or as a metaphor for the collapse of the state machine that soon
followed.
RIver Pripyat near the town port. 2016.
References
Alexievich, S. 1999. Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future, Edited by: Bouis, A. London:
Aurum Press.
Cole, T. (2000). Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How history is bought,
packaged, and sold. Psychology Press.
Dobraszczyk, P. (2010). Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city. City, 14(4),
370-389. Available at : http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2010.496190?
scroll=top&needAccess=true
Eberstadt, N. (2010). Russia's peacetime demographic crisis: Dimensions, causes, implications.
Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Asian Research.
Lisle, D. (2004). Gazing at ground zero: Tourism, voyeurism and spectacle. Journal for Cultural
Research, 8(1), 3-21.
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N.French, University of Birmingham
09/2016
Stone, “Dark Tourism, Heterotopias and Post-Apocalyptic Places: The Case of Chernobyl,” in Dark
Tourism and Place Identity, ed. Leanne White and Elspeth Frew (New York, 2013).
ВИКТОР ДЯТЛИКОВИЧ, АЛИСА КУРМАНАЕВА, ДМИТРИЙ ПЕТРЕНКо RBC (2015). http://
style.rbc.ru/guide/travel/571638f39a79472acdb34f09
Yankovska, G., & Hannam, K. (2014). Dark and toxic tourism in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Current Issues in Tourism, 17(10), 929-939.
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